Single word triggering flow with multiple word trigger

(Philip Mccarthy) #1

Hi

I’ve having some hassles with certain words that trigger multiple flows.

One word is ‘fishing’.

Through testing I’ve established that it will trigger a flow with this word/phrase:

‘fishing fees’

It won’t trigger other similar word/phrases such as:

‘fishing licence’

So I’m puzzled what is going on here. I’m guessing it has something to do with word matching?

Thanks, Phil

(Daniel Beckett) #2

Hi @Philip_Mccarthy

Flow XO uses Word & Phrase Matching which is great for finding partial matches but can cause conflicts when using the same words. It’s usually better to provide several longer phrases if you need to match on more subtle variations of a theme, and use single words carefully for very broad matching.

There’s no direct fix for this but there are some alternative approaches that could be taken to help deal with the issue. You could structure menus through using the Ask a Question service and present the users with specific choices and then direct them to other flows or parts of the same flow by using the Flow service with Filters. This gives you full control over what they input and removes the need for a broad set of trigger words.

As a more advanced solution you could look into adding in some natural language understanding (NLU) capability into your bot. This can be done by connecting to third party services like Dialogflow. There’s a tutorial for Using Flow XO with Dialogflow that shows how this can be setup.

Hope that helps!

Thanks,
Dan

(Philip Mccarthy) #3

Hi Daniel

Thanks for being so responsive. I’ve read you response with interest. I’m using a main menu to guide users to make predefined choices, but also have a range of flows to capture other free text queries. I also use filters extensively to handle queries that might otherwise trigger multiple flows. The word ‘fish’ triggers so many flows its not funny! In fact I’ve got nearly 30 flows happening which probably explains some of the challenges I’ve come up against. On balance they all work pretty I think.

I think NLU is the ultimate solution here, and yes I’ve done lots of reading around Dialog Flow. I get it, and will be looking to implement that in ‘Version 2’ of the bot.

Cheers, Phil